For about an hour on Tuesday I pointed my browser to a proxy that refreshed an official Iranian government site every second. In doing so, I participated in a form of cyberwarfare called a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, and the ethics of that act are complex.
To me, though, my intention made the ethics simple. I wasn't opening a dialog or expressing a thought. I was throwing a rock. And no matter how evolved we become, it's important to remember that a rock through a window remains an effective way of communicating to the people inside that the people outside are displeased.
Constructive? Absolutely not. But it delivered the message that government repression could be confronted by other forces, and it did so in a language understood by bullies of all nationalities: Power.
We need to construct a better world, and we won't do that by violence. But our strength as a distributed network of people who care about justice and democracy need not always be hobbled by the finer points of discussion, no matter how valid those principles may be.
A rock isn't the message. It's a medium.
Did you hear the piece on NPR yesterday about Twitter and Iran?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105685422
I found the whole 'RT' thing pretty interesting - and this morning have followed (on the NPR site) some of the 'tweets' re:Iran. Rocks indeed. I think that what is going on over there and the outcome (almost whatever it is) is one of the most powerful things I've seen in awhile.
I'm not into the whole Twitter thing, and while the NPR piece still suggested that text messages/phone calls are still the main method of communication - the 'tweets' for this thing sure make for a compelling and powerful background to a major event. I almost think of it as data - each tweet is an individual data point, and when one evaluates it using the appropriate statistics, one starts getting an image of what is happening.
ps Party sounds fun!
Posted by: Pam | Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 11:49